Reelpolitics

This past January, a Salt Lake City audience that included several state politicians watched Invisible Revolution, a documentary film featuring images of a teen Klan wedding replete with gun-toting (and -shooting) guests, shots of racially motivated murder sites in nearby Nevada, doggerel-spouting white supremacist young men, and street showdowns between Anti-Racist Action youth members and bigoted skinheads.

The film's director, Beverly Peterson, in Utah for the Sundance Film Festival, spoke to the assembled, drawing their attention to a recent expansion in racist skinhead activity in the area. Her goal was to inspire the politicians to rally behind a comprehensive statewide hate-crimes bill that was to be voted on later that week in the state Senate. "Sure enough, a week later the bill, which contained more protections for gays and lesbians, passed," says Robert West, executive director of Working Films, the year-old documentary film organization that mounted the Invisible Revolution event in Utah (the bill recently faltered, however, in the Republican-controlled House). Peterson--who shot her film on Betacam for roughly $85,000 of mostly her own money, with some small grants and a research fellowship--has high hopes that her film may influence other such fights throughout the country.

Fortunately, Invisible Revolution is not the only activist film out there. "The political filmmakers are still working, it's just that their activity doesn't get publicity," says Patricia Thomson, editor in chief of The Independent Film & Video Monthly, noting that the lion's share of today's activist films are documentaries.

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